RIAA

Kanye West’s last album has just made streaming history.
The Life of Pablo, released a little over a year ago, just went Platinum with over 1.5 billion song streams in the U.S.
While popular albums frequently go platinum, this is a big deal because Kanye’s album reached this milestone relying on streams alone – no paid downloads.
Let me explain:
An album typically goes… Read More

RIAA’s budget comes from music labels and distributors because it represents the interests of the music industry. Therefore, it depends on their willingness. TorrentFreak obtained its latest tax filing and the RIAA is facing the same difficulties as the major music labels. Its budget has been cut to $29.1 million for 2010-2011 from $51.35 million two years earlier. Yet, the most… Read More

Earlier this month, Cary Sherman, the RIAA’s CEO, wrote a controversial op-ed in which he raised questions about the impact of Google and Wikipedia on America’s “democratic process”. So when I Skyped with Sherman earlier this week, I leveraged social media’s democratic process to ask the RIAA CEO some direct questions from my Twitter community about piracy, the… Read More

NeuLion announced a deal a few days ago to bring “a brand new service for UFC offering the most interactive, far-reaching digital experience yet.” Last night’s UFC 126 was the first pay-per-view event to receive the NeuLion treatment, so I decided to check it out to see what all the fuss was about. Fair warning: There will be spoliers. Read More

Man, they’re still fighting, aren’t they? ChillingEffects’ stats, by way of TorrentFreak, reveal that the “international music industry,” in the form of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, has sent the most DMCA takedowns notices in 2010, with some 1,272 notices sent in the year. In third place is some Brazilian hardware site, Clube do Hardware. Read More

The RIAA, still fighting the good fight. LimeWire as you knew it was shut down a few weeks ago because of an RIAA-secured court order. So LimeWire says, “OK, we’ll alter the application so that it complies with your wished, RIAA.” Today we’ve learnt that a new LimeWire has started to circle around the Internet, and now the RIAA is having another fit. Again… Read More

Apple has posted a cryptic message on its Web site, teasing the world about an “exciting” iTunes announcement that’s coming tomorrow. What could it be? I saw that someone had suggested The Beatles were finally coming to iTunes, but really, who cares? If you want The Beatles on your iPhone you can grab the newly remastered albums that came out last year, “rip, mix… Read More

In an offense called “Operation Payback,” members of the Internet collective Anonymous have organized what seems to be anti anti-piracy movement. Dubbed by Torrent Freak as the “protest of the future” the group has been pretty busy over the past 36 hours launching DDoS attacks on the MPAA, Indian anti-piracy site Aiplex Software and today both RIAA.com and RIAA.org. Read More

Famous rock band Radiohead released an album a few years ago called In Rainbows. The band initially released the album online for free. Well, not for “free,” per se, but you were given the option to pay whatever you wanted. That promotion only lasted a little while, as the band later teamed up with traditional record labels (like Warner and Sony) to release a physical album. Read More

Latest Crunch Report

Famous rock band Guns N’ Roses released their latest album, Chinese Democracy, in November, 2008. It had been in development for an astonishing 15 years. That’s partially why Kevin Cogill got into so much trouble. You’ll recall that he was caught uploading tracks from the then-unreleased album in June, 2008. While he managed to doge jail time, Cogill was given a year of… Read More

“It will be only a matter of time—months rather than years—before the music business establishment completely folds. [It will be] no great loss to the world.” So says Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke, a man who knows a thing or two about how the music industry works. Read More

There really isn’t any particular point to the following story other than to get you riled up as your begin your weekend. The U.S. government is actively trying to figure out how best to handle intellectual property rights, so it has asked the concerned parties to submit all sorts of information in order to better understand what’s going no. The person in charge of this is the… Read More

Oh dear, oh dear. How utterly delightful! It seems that the major members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association have been a bit hypocritical over the last… oh, 20 years. It seems they’ve included a truly enormous amount of tracks on compilation CDs without paying the artists a dime, instead putting them on a “pending list.”
This list is somewhere around… Read More

It has come to my attention that the music industry now wants royalties for those 30-second clips of music you hear in iTunes. That, I think you’ll agree, is bullshit. Seeing as though we’re a solution-oriented blog here at CrunchGear, I want to offer a completely fool-proof way to save the music industry and put an end to the years and years of nonsense we’ve seen since… Read More

And now, the 900th note on Internet piracy written in the past week. It would appear that the UK is inching closer to a law that would require ISPs to disconnect people who download music, movies, etc. illegally. The proposal, currently making its way through the back rooms of the British Government, could well be placed before the Parliament during its next session. Read More

For years you’ve been using the well-supported, ubiquitous file format called MP3. It’s an international standard, it works just fine in every media player, and other universally-accepted formats are in place for the album artwork, lyrics, and what have you.
Sounds like you’re ready for a new, unified format that no one has ever heard of and, if introduced five or six years… Read More

The chief spokesman for the RIAA, one Jonathan Lamy, has gone on record to say what any normal, not-on-the-RIAA-payroll person has been saying for some time now: “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” Yes. Yes it it. Read More

It’s safe to say that I shed no tears yesterday when, for all intents and purposes, The Pirate Bay ceased to be. Suffice it to say that if Usenet comes under attack next I will not be a happy camper. (I know, I know: The first rule of Usenet is not to talk about Usenet, but bear with the story for a minute.) The RIAA just won a lawsuit against usenet.com, which, as you might guess, is… Read More